


East of the Sun, West of the Moon

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Space AU of a Space Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 05:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16298723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: The ship lands in the bay and Rey hurries towards it, her clipboard in hand, prepared to run her diagnostic checks when she sees—“How did you get her scratched?” she demands of the pilot as he descends from the cockpit.  She calls him the pilot, mostly out of spite.  He makes a big deal about going by his bridge name rather than his given name. It’s such a dumb thing and no one but him does it and she refuses to call him Kylo Ren and doesn’t know his real name.  “What happened?”“She’s fast,” he says, ignoring the question.  “Has a good clip to her.”“I know that,” Rey replies mulishly and she jabs him in the chest with the end of her pen, “and you scratched her.”“Could have been worse,” he replies.  “Could have been her jet transfusers.”Rey glares at him and he sidles away.The pilot is the reason that Rey hates the stars.He gets to fly through them in ships she builds, and she never will.And he always manages to damage the ships.





	East of the Sun, West of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordanna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordanna/gifts).



> This is a fic for cordanna, who won a giveaway I was running on my [tumblr](http://crossingwinter.tumblr.com/reylo). The idea of a space setting was her prompt and I tied it in with my feels from the opening line of a poem by Jack Gilbert-- "Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew."

The stars are beautiful.

Somewhere, in the back of her mind, Rey remembers reading magazines in waiting rooms about how starry nights were the most romantic.

Stars are giant balls of gas, millions of miles away, as Pumba had told her when she’d first watched  _ The Lion King _ .

Stars are so plentiful she can’t even begin to count them, though she tries on sleepless nights when she’s tossing and turning on her bunk. 

Stars are beautiful, and romantic, and scientifically fascinating.

Rey hates them.

 

-

 

To be fair, she doesn’t hate them for anything they’ve ever done for her.  

If anything, she should be grateful for their existence.  Without the stars, she wouldn’t have found her academic field.  Not that she chose physics because she wanted to study the stars.  She’d chosen physics because little old Maz Kanata wanted to try reading star signs or something—especially since Rey’s Tarot only ever came out with conflicting information—and Maz had told her that she would take to the stars.  

That was back when you could still see the stars through the smog.  That was back before everyone had to take to the stars, so really, she’s even not sure it’s what Maz saw that brought her there.

Perhaps that’s part of why she hates them.  She feels indebted to them for reasons that don’t line up with why she’s with everyone aboard  _ Icarus _ .  She’s here because she has to be.  Mas told her it was her destiny, but maybe destiny’s a nice way of saying Earth was destroyed.

 

-

 

The ship lands in the bay and Rey hurries towards it, her clipboard in hand, prepared to run her diagnostic checks when she sees—

“How did you get her scratched?” she demands of the pilot as he descends from the cockpit.  She calls him the pilot, mostly out of spite. He makes a big deal about going by his bridge name rather than his given name. It’s such a dumb thing and no one but him does it and she refuses to call him Kylo Ren and doesn’t know his real name.  “What happened?”

“She’s fast,” he says, ignoring the question.  “Has a good clip to her.”

“I know that,” Rey replies mulishly and she jabs him in the chest with the end of her pen, “and you scratched her.”

“Could have been worse,” he replies.  “Could have been her jet transfusers.”

Rey glares at him and he sidles away.

The pilot is the reason that Rey hates the stars.

He gets to fly through them in ships she builds, and she never will.

And he always manages to damage the ships.

 

-

 

It’s late one night in a cantina that Rey finds herself—drunkenly—led to a flight simulator by a friend of Finn’s.  Finn’s friend is a pilot. How Finn made friends with a pilot is beyond her. Probably in a similar way to how Finn made friends with an engineer.  Two engineers, really. Since, independently of Rey, he’d befriended Rose too.

“Come on,” Poe says, “You’ll never actually be able to put in a bid to become a pilot if you’ve never been in a flight simulator.”

“How do you know I want to be a pilot?” Rey asks, knowing the answer is  _ because Finn told me _ .  She’s just tipsy enough to let herself be led, and just tipsy enough to type in her own bridge name, Dosmit Ræh, so that her score will attach to her profile. 

“Hold my beer,” she tells Finn as the screen in front of her lights up and she grips the controls.

She has no idea what she’s doing.

But, oddly, she does.

 

-

 

“You blew out the power couplings?” Rey demands angrily when the pilot hops out of the cockpit this time.  “This one wasn’t built for speed—why were you testing it for speed?”

“Because when you’ve got Megas on your tail, you don’t have much of a choice,” he replies.

Rey stops short.  “You had Megas on your tail?”  They weren’t supposed to have come this far out.  They were supposed to have gone west of the sun. They weren’t supposed to come into this sector.  Rey’s stomach tightens with nerves at the idea of it. 

“No,” he replies and she could hit him.  “If I’d had Megas on my tail, I’d have been toast.  You should reroute the thermal line through the boosters.”

“Which one of us is the pilot and which is the engineer, Ren?”  Rey demands because she doesn’t like taking bullshit from anyone, and the pilot is just arrogant enough to be giving her bullshit right now.  

“I don’t know, Ræh. Maybe you should answer that.”

It’s the first time he’s called her by a name, period, much less by her bridge name.

Rey can’t remember having told him, but he could easily have found it out by scanning through any of the computers.

But from the way he says it, she gets the sense that he’d seen her simulator score.

 

-

 

Which is why, Rey is sure, she ends up back in the simulator a week later, this time sober, this time determined.  Poe isn’t there this time. This time, it’s just her and Finn, and no beer at all. This time it’s Rey and hands that are acting reflexively as she jerks the controls hither and thither, watching out of the corner of her eye as points rack up in the corner.  Now that she’s used to the simulator, it’s not that bad.

It’s not even that hard.

 

-

 

The General is on a breathing machine.  She’d smoked for a good forty years on Earth, and when the atmosphere got worse, it had taken a toll on her lungs.  She takes a daily steroid, prescribed by the station’s medical wing, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes, Rey doesn’t see her walking through the halls, lugging an oxygen tank behind her, a mask pressed over her nose and mouth.

The one time that Rey offers to help her, to pull the tank for her for a few minutes, the General shrugs her off.

“She doesn’t like being made to feel weak,” Poe tells her.

Rey can understand that, but, all the same, “That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t get help.  That thing’s heavy and she’s not exactly young.”

Poe grimaces and looks around.  “I think when people offer to help her, it reminds her that her husband is dead and her son—” he cuts himself off.

Rey hadn’t even known the General had a son.  “What about her son?”

“Well—that he doesn’t care about her, I guess.”

“Is he here?”   _ Or is he a Mega? _ she wonders silently.  

“He was for a while,” Poe says and he drops his voice even more.  “But he got cold feet as people were picking ships. He came back.  But he won’t look at her now. Won’t acknowledge her or anything.”

“What division is he in?”  Rey asks, perhaps with a little more violent intent than she’d ordinarily admit to.  She sees red about parents, though. She knows she does. She never had them, and to have the General for a mother and to let her struggle with an oxygen tank that’s too heavy for her...

So it doesn’t surprise her as much as it should when Poe gives her a look and tells her, “Kylo Ren.”

 

-

 

“With a score like that, you could actually transition to piloting, you know,” the pilot tells her conversationally, as though they are continuing a discussion rather than—

“Did you bust my computer integration?” Rey snarls at him as she examines the side-panel that’s blinking.  Usually, she is angry with him; today she is livid.

“It fried itself about ten minutes into the test flight.  I think the wiring was busted. Not that I’m telling you how to do your job the way you tell me how to do mine.”

She glares at him.  “You could transition though,” he continues.  “I could get you an introduction with—”

“I don’t need anything from you,” she cuts him off.  “I like what I do, thank you very much.”

“So the simulations are just for fun?”

“Fuck off.”

“For what—offering to help?”

“Go help your mom.  She needs it more than me.  She can’t breathe sometimes.”

She turns away from him to examine the integration wiring.  She doesn’t hear him walk away, but when, at last, she turns to examine another part of the ship, he is gone.

 

-

 

She thinks he does it on purpose, after that, damaging her ships.  

He doesn’t talk to her anymore, so she considers that a plus.  He doesn’t look at her, either. 

Although, oddly, she gets the sense that he’s avoiding her gaze, rather than that he’s trying to avoid her.  

 

-

 

She starts going to the simulator without Finn.  She starts going when she’s off shift, when it’s “night,” though it’s always night in space.  There are always stars in the sky and no polluted atmosphere to hide them from sight. They sparkle as far as she can see, and she wonders if there’s life out there, if there’s a place that they’ll be able to repopulate, or if the last dregs of humanity will fade to nothingness out there in the bleak black space, out of fuel, out of oxygen, the final victims of their own hubris.

Those are the nights she flies the best—the ones where she loses herself to the nihilism that she kept at bay for most of her youth.  What was the point of flying if they were going to run out of fuel and asphyxiate in space? What was the point of existing if her parents didn’t want her?

She flies better and better in the simulator.  She’s almost relaxed as she does it. It’s soothing, feeling as though she’s going fast, watching as the stars blur a little bit around her the way headlights on the freeway at night had used to.

“Do you want to be a pilot, though?”

She almost falls out of the seat, hitting the abort button that ends the simulation.

The pilot is standing there, watching her, his arms crossed over his broad chest, his face unfathomable.

“Doesn’t everyone?” she asks.

“No,” he replies.  “Some of us wanted to be engineers, but our dads wouldn’t hear of it.”

She stares at him.  Engineers—good engineers—are prized these days.  They’re the ones that innovate, that come up with solutions to unanswerable problems.  Pilots are meatheads—everyone knows that. 

“Your dad—”

“Would have disappointed you,” he says.  “He disappointed me. So did my uncle.” He doesn’t mention his mom, though.

“If he disappointed you, why aren’t you seeing what you can do about changing assignments then?”

He doesn’t answer, though.  The pilot uncrosses his arms and takes a step towards her, cautiously.  “You’re good enough for it—if you want it.”

“I’m good enough for anything,” Rey snaps.  “And I don’t need to be told it.”

He’s watching her closely, though.  “No,” he says at last. “You do.”

And that’s it.  That’s it and he’s gone and Rey’s just sitting that in the sim chair, wondering why it is that she’s suddenly feeling so warm.

Space is cold.  Space is cold and the stars are far away.

 

-

 

Rey puts in an application.

She tells herself it’s not because Kylo Ren had told her that she could do it.  She tells herself that it’s because she knows she can. That she has always had to fight for what she wants and if flying in the simulators is calming, then why shouldn’t she do it?

She doesn’t tell Poe.  She doesn’t tell Finn. She doesn’t tell Rose.

And she doesn’t tell Kylo either, but when he disembarks next, she can see in his eyes that he knows.

And she hates that he looks like he’s proud of her.

She hates that she revels in it even more.

 

-

 

Rey’s simulator score, as Kylo had predicted, is more than high enough to get her into a training class.  In fact, it gets her out of two training class levels and puts her very close to a junior certification. The only thing left for her to do is to fly out in space for forty hours with an instructor.

For a moment, she’s afraid it’ll be Kylo.

But she ends up flying with Poe, which is fine.  It makes sense. 

They don’t talk much as she takes the lead in their copiloting.  Rey’s one of the stars now, and there’s something grand about that.  The hubris of humanity, as everyone had called the destruction of Earth—well—if this is hubris, she understands why Icarus wanted to fly closer to the sun.  She understands, for the first time perhaps, why the General had insisted on naming the station  _ Icarus _ .

She could get lost among the stars—and easily without a proper navigational computer.  She could die out here.

Or she could live out here.

Because out here, she feels alive—truly alive—for the first time in her life.

 

-

 

“Ræh,” the General wheezes at her, and Rey turns and hurries to her.  The General is leaning heavily on her walking stick, holding her mask to her face, breathing deeply.  

“General?” Rey asks her, and the General jerks her head towards a window that has a little bench next to it.  They walk to it, very slowly.

“My dad had lung problems,” the General tells her between constricted breaths.  “Should have taken that as a sign never to smoke.” She rolls her eyes, and settles down and inhales deeply from her tank.  Then she turns her gaze to Rey. “I hear you’re going to be a pilot.”

Rey looks at her shyly.  That the General even knows who she is—of all the thousands of people on  _ Icarus _ —is already humbling.  

“I am,” Rey tells her.  “If I get my cert hours in.”

“My husband was a pilot,” the General tells her.  “And my son…” her voice trails away, but Rey gets the sense that—far from being lost in thought—the woman’s eyes have sharpened.  “You’re going to make a good pilot,” the General tells her.

“You can’t know that,” Rey mumbles, almost nervous with the praise.

“You have good instincts.  If there’s one thing I learned from Han, it’s that instincts are what makes a pilot a good one.”  

“How do you know I have good instincts?” Rey asks, and as the words leave her mouth she thinks what a stupid question that is.  This is General Organa, whas read access to just about every file in this station. She could easily have found any of the write-ups that Poe has made about Rey in the past few flights, or even her simulation stats.

But the General’s eyes go a little bright and her hand tightens on Rey’s arm and she says.  “You knew what to say to send my son home.”

 

-

 

She hasn’t seen Kylo Ren since she started training.  She hasn’t wanted to—has been glad not to see him. She hasn’t wanted to admit to herself that she’s afraid of his pride.  It’s harder to admit to herself that she’s also afraid of his mother’s gratitude, that she might be being built up into something she’s not, into something she doesn’t know that she can be.

She drinks with Finn and Rose in the cantina, too lost in thought to really register that they’re holding hands.  

She flies with Poe and weaves her way through the stars.

And when she lands, she gives her ship back to the engineers she’d once worked with.

Her flight schedules aren’t compatible with Ren’s.  That’s the only explanation. 

She doesn’t see him anywhere.

 

-

 

She gets her pilot certification.  Once, on Earth, there might have been a little ceremony for it.  A graduation of sorts. But no one’s got time for that now. So Rey just gets clearances added to her badge and a schedule for when she’s to take ships out.  She’s doing test runs now, for the most part. That’s what most of the pilots do.

“So long as the Megas stick to their quadrants, there’s no need for anything else,” Vice Admiral Holdo tells her.  “But we need to make sure our tech is good, and we need to keep our eyes open in case there’s an incursion.”

So out Rey goes.

She doesn’t fry her computer.  She doesn’t blow her power couplings.  She doesn’t bring the ships back with so much as a scratch on them.

The tech is good, and Rey’s good.  Everything’s good.

And the stars are beautiful.

 

-

 

And then the stars aren’t beautiful.

The stars become deadly, because there are Mega ships in front of her, jamming her hailing frequencies, blocking her escape as they aim cannons at her.

What they’re planning, Rey doesn’t know, and how long they’ve been there she doesn’t know either, but they don’t want her to live and that’s more than enough information for  _ Icarus _ .

So Rey takes a deep breath and pretends she’s back in the simulator, that Finn is watching her go, or maybe it’s Kylo Ren with his arms crossed and his eyes proud as she swerves out of the way and does her best to trust those good pilot’s instincts that General Organa had praised.

She corkscrews her way through the Mega ships.  Their pilots had clearly not been prepared for her to do something quite that stupid and she doesn’t turn on her radar as she begins zig-zagging her way through space.  Harder to hit a zig-zagging target, and Kylo had said this ship couldn’t outrun them, so the best she can do is not let herself get hit. 

She glances at the change-log as she flies.  Somewhere in the back of her mind, someone is yelling at her for daring to get distracted in such a moment, but she scans through lines of logs until she finds it: the suggestion he’d made to reroute the thermal line.

She ups her speed.

The ship kicks forward.

The five dots on her radar fade slowly out of range.

It’s only when Rey starts to breathe again that she realizes she hadn’t been.

 

-

 

“Megas,” she chokes out the moment she’s back in the landing bay.  “In quadrant six. They tried to shoot me out of the skies.”

Poe’s eyes go wide and he grabs Rey’s shoulders.  “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” she says.  Her throat is dry. She needs water.  She needs her heart to stop hammering like this.  “I can go out ag—”

“No.  You stay here.  We’ll download the coordinates from your flight.  Oddy. Snap. Load up.” And Poe is gone.

Rey sags.

She wants to help, but her legs feel like jelly, and now that she’s alive and safely back on  _ Icarus _ , she can admit to herself she was frightened.

“I was going to say you needed a good excuse to turn this ship back to me in these conditions.”

His voice is low, hoarse, and she can tell he’s trying to joke, but when she turns to him and sees him in his dark brown jumpsuit and holding a clipboard, she understands just why she hadn’t seen him at all since she’d started her flights.  

And a moment later, she’s stumbling towards him and he’s solid, and there and wrapping his arms around her, holding her tight.  “You’re safe,” he tells her. “You’re safe—you made it home safe.”

And in his arms, she believes it.

 

-

 

“My dad wanted me to be a pilot.  So did my uncle,” he tells her. They’re in the cantina, and she’s on her second beer.  “I didn’t want that. But that’s where I ended up. That’s what was in my blood.” He grimaces.  “And I like flying. I miss it sometimes. But that’s what the simulator is for. I’ve always liked breaking things and putting them back together just to see how they work much more.”  He swallows. “I do that to myself too much. And breaking myself so they’ll love me isn’t love.” Rey shivers at that. She wonders how much she broke herself for her parents too.

Rey just listens to him talk. He rambles on, tells her about why he was almost a Mega, and why he came to  _ Icarus _ .  He tells her about his mom, and about how things are hard, but better than they were.  He tells her how he hates that she can’t breathe. He tells her how strange it is to be called by his name again.

“What is your name?” she asks him.

“Ben,” he says slowly.  “Ben Solo.”

“Ben,” she repeats and a strange look crosses his face.  “I like that. It fits you.”

She sits there and waits for him to keep talking, but he seems to have hit a wall.  She finds that she misses his voice. Quite apart from feeling as though he didn’t care about her, that he just wanted to talk in order to talk, it had been comforting, to have him talk to her, to let her just sit there and be quiet, acutely aware of how alive she is.  She gets the sense that he’d listen to her ramble on for hours if she could muster the strength for words.

But she can’t.

Which is maybe why she takes his hand.

 

-

 

She’s moved quarters now that she’s a pilot.  The room is less cramped, though that is not why she likes it.  She likes it because from the moment she first walked into it, it felt like home.

Ben smiles a quiet smile when she leads him into it and runs his hand along a dent in the wall and Rey knows without knowing.

“This was your room, wasn’t it?”

He nods.  “Was yours B4-893?”

She grins up at him and wraps her arms around his neck.  Rey’s tall, but Ben’s taller and she likes that she has to stand on tiptoes to kiss him properly.  She likes that his hands come to her hips to make sure she’s steady, even though there’s no chance of her losing balance with her arms around him like this.  And she likes the way that his lips taste, a little salty, a little sweet, as she nibbles and sucks at them.

He walks her backwards until the back of her knees hit the bunk and she sinks back onto it, pulling him forward so that he’s hovering over her, kissing him greedily, hungrily, needily because now that she’s started, she doesn’t want to stop.  She doesn’t want to stop, she doesn’t want him to stop and she gets the sense as their hands fumble at clothes, that he understands.

He’s flown through the stars too.

Rey’s clothes come off easily, but Ben’s jumpsuit doesn’t.  Or maybe it is that she’d been willing to help him take off her clothes, but now that she’s naked, his hands seem to want to touch her more than to get his own clothes off.  “Help me, will you?” she growls, and he laughs lightly into her lips.

“Always telling me what I’m doing wrong,” he teases as he pulls away from her and shrugs the jumpsuit past his hips.  

“When it isn’t doing you any good, I will,” she retorts as he shimmies them down his legs.  Then he looks back at her in his undershirt and boxers.

“Yeah,” he agrees, “That wasn’t doing me any good.”

“Oh?”

“The view’s spectacular up here.”

She grabs him by the front of his shirt and pulls him back towards her, but he grabs her wrist with a grin.  Then he tugs his shirt off and Rey’s mind goes blank because—well—the view’s spectacular from down here too.

But she doesn’t get to look at it for very long, and that’s ok too because the moment his skin connects with hers, her blood seems to pump a little faster, her body seems to grow warmer and it doesn’t matter if space is cold as long as Ben’s with her.  She wonders how she can have ever hated the stars as he kisses his way along her throat, as he rubs the back of his fingers over her rib cage, as her breath mingles with his and they breathe precious oxygen together.

Rey doesn’t like the idea of losing herself to another person.  That feels wrong, that feels like giving in. And after everything she’s been through in her life, she’ll be damned if she gives in.  And she wouldn’t call it losing herself to Ben, the way that her body seems to ache for him more and more the longer they touch, the way her heart seems to swell whenever they break a kiss long enough to stare into one another’s eyes, the way she forgets that she used to get annoyed at the mere idea of him.  How can she have ever gotten annoyed at the mere idea of him? When he makes her feel the way that sun before the smog had felt on her skin? But she loses a little bit of something that made her her, and she finds she doesn’t miss it, that angry loneliness. That doesn’t need to be part of her anymore.

They roll with each other on the too-cramped bunk in the tiny cabin and Rey wonders if it felt like home because it had some trace of him there, trying to care about her, trying to care about himself.  She wonders if there can be traces of someone left behind in a space they occupied once. Maz Kanata would say yes, which makes Rey almost believe it.

There are traces of Ben in her bunk, in her cockpit, in the stars she races through.  And when she straddles his hips and sinks down onto him, the noise he makes feels like home too, deep and low in his chest, right by his heart.   _ You,  _ that noise seems to say because he is at a loss for words.   _ Me _ , is Rey’s moaned reply when his fingers toy between her legs and her heart seems to pump more strongly in her chest.   _ You and me, me and you,  _ until her head falls back and her body spends.

The bunk is too small—and Ben is too broad—for them to lie comfortably next to one another, stretched out and languid the way that Rey feels.  But Ben curls around her and as he falls asleep at her back, she feels so warm and safe and peaceful that she doesn’t have to count the stars to fall asleep.

 

-

 

“You scratched her,” Ben says dryly as Rey climbs down from the cockpit.

“I had four Megas on my tail,” she retorts.  She’s more than a little annoyed that two of them had gotten away, try as she might to focus on the two she’d managed to destroy.

Ben kisses the top of her head—as much as either of them are willing to do in public—and squeezes her hand briefly.  She sees the way her words have spooked him, and knows he’s searching for something to say that can be said in front of other people.

He lands on, “Well, do better next time.  You’re not much of a pilot if you get away but break your ship.  Come on.”

She steps on his foot and he grins down at her and pulls her into his arms again and Rey lets the steady thumping of his heart tell her that she’s safe, she’s alive, and that tomorrow they’ll still be alive.


End file.
